This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order
presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution
to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about
permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Politicians should get over their allergy to academia

This past week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about gerrymandering, the process of manipulating the size and shape of voting districts to the advantage of the political party in power.

The courts have tried for years to address this problem, but the case before the justices this month takes an innovative approach. Social scientists have come up with a way for courts to use mathematical algorithms to determine a standard for what constitutes manipulation in redistricting voter maps, to allow the legal system to stop politicians from gaming the system.

Chief Justice John Roberts seemed puzzled by the argument. “Plaintiffs are asking this court to launch a redistricting revolution based upon their social science metrics,” he said. “It may be simply my educational background, but I can only describe it as sociological gobbledygook.”

Roberts, who went to an elite prep school before attending Harvard for both his undergraduate degree in history (summa cum laude) and his Juris Doctor (magna cum laude), sounded more like Phil Hartman’s “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer” character than the chief judge of the most powerful court in America.

Was it really a lack of academic sophistication that prevented Roberts from understanding how and why gerrymandering is harmful to democracy and how it can be fixed? Or is it that redistricting is more favorable to the Republican Party, of which he has been a lifelong member?

One can pose similar questions when hundreds of members of the U.S. Congress disavow the vast preponderance of scientific evidence of man-made climate change, pretending the fancy formulas of the nerds in the ivory towers simply don’t make sense to their simple brains.

Plenty of Canadian politicians have suffered from the same affectation of scientific incompetence. For years, policymakers in Ottawa ignored widespread evidence of the effectiveness of harm-reduction efforts like safe-injection sites, and over the past decade, they have silenced scientists who’ve had evidence of environmental harm from economically-lucrative industries.

The allergy to academia goes well beyond politics. “Every time we have the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences, you have a piece by (Globe and Mail columnist) Margaret Wente talking about the titles of the more easily lampooned papers,” said Charles Ungerleider, an education sociologist at the University of British Columbia. “The public would, in turn, say ‘my money went to that?’ ”

Canadians and Americans spend close to a half trillion dollars on university tuitions every year, often mortgaging their homes and their futures to provide higher education to young adults. Why bother, when well-reasoned research can be dismissed as “gobbledygook”?

There is no doubt that plenty of professors like to use big words as they write about small, esoteric studies. While it is true that some academic research is poorly done and seemingly irrelevant, one can argue that many of these granular bits of scholarship can contribute upstream to larger discoveries in the future. And it’s certainly true that a lot of academic research can have real impact on society – if it every gets out of the academy.

Ungerleider, who also served as B.C.’s deputy minister of education, understands the skepticism about academic research, and he was one of the early proponents of “knowledge mobilization,” an effort by universities and research funders to bring scholarship out of universities and into the communities that could make use of relevant findings. One of the goals, he said, is “to build public support to enhance research funding.”

In 2006, the primary funder of social science and humanities research in Canada, SSHRC, made knowledge mobilization a mandatory part of funding applications. “At end of the day research that is publicly funded should be shared – not just with specialists in the field but broadly with the public,” said Chad Gaffield, who was president of the government-funded agency at the time. At first, many scholars resisted this additional requirement, but over time, Gaffield said, they realized “it’s better to reach thousands of people than six people in your field… It’s a rich way for you to advance your research.”

Canada has been a leader in knowledge mobilization, but it’s a public outreach mandate that is just a decade old and by most accounts the U.S. is far behind with these efforts.

That may partly explain how U.S. politicians – most of whom are highly educated – can get away with demonizing the work that goes on inside ivy-clad buildings on campuses.

At the Supreme Court hearing this week, while Justice Roberts was trying to get his head around how computers work, an opponent of gerrymandering observed the proceedings from the gallery. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former bodybuilder and actor, has a mere BA by correspondence in International Marketing of Fitness, but he learned politics on the job as governor of California and he seemed to comprehend fully the harm of manipulated districting and how a formula from social scientists can help stop it.

Get more opinion in your inbox

Go straight to the heart of an issue with the Star's Opinion newsletter, featuring the latest from our top columnists and more.

Outside the court, Schwarzenegger suggested districts should be determined by independent commissions, not by politicians. “We are here today to ask the Supreme Court to fix something that the politicians will never do,” he said, before quoting a prominent deceased scholar. “As Einstein said, those who created the problem will not be able to solve it.”

Peter W. Klein is a professor at the University of British Columbia and Executive Director of the Global Reporting Centre.

More from The Star & Partners

More Opinion

Top Stories

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All
rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is
expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto
Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of
Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com